Enhance the courses importer to be more full-featured

[danahertzberg]

Motivation

The courses importer is helpful, but does not contain enough detail. Other departments had to make customizations.

COH Course and QS Course Comparison Summary

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I need more functionality from the course importer

Proposed Resolution

Describe the solution you'd like

Expand the information imported for courses. New styling will also be needed.

Describe alternatives you've considered

None

[danahertzberg]

Should this come before the Integration of Profiles API with "Person" Content Type?

[kevdevlu]

Background

See coh_course module from here: https://github.com/uaz-web/coh_master. This is a variant of the az_course module that Troy built with enhanced features for Humanities and that I inherited and further modified. Even before coming on to CWS, other departments (like Math dept) have reached out to us with an interest in adopting this variant of the course importer.

coh_course has these key features missing from the current az_course module as detailed in the google doc Dana shared above:

1. Ability to import specific sections of courses of each available semester.
   • sections of courses have different instructors, start and end times, class times, and enrollment numbers.
   • these instructors are then linked to their profiles on the website
   • the instructors profiles on the website has a block that shows the current classes they are teaching
2. Ability to search by courses' titles, descriptions, instructor names, etc.
3. Ability to import the courses' course attributes, and filter courses by them. Course attributes are extremely useful for humanities. For other departments like Math and Sciences, i'd imagine prerequisites are more important.
4. Ability to have periodic imports set by site admin

3 Different Approaches

1. Make a separate module from az_course. Make coh_course work with quickstart and pantheon*, and name it something like az_course_schedules, as a separate module from az_course.
2. Fix up coh_course to work in quickstart and pantheon* and have it replace the current az_course module.
   • this might not be a good idea depending on how many folks are currently using az_course
3. Beef up the current az_course module with features we want from coh_course, adjusted for campus-wide use

*To make coh_course work with quickstart and pantheon, 2 things need to be improved / changed:

1. make it work with pantheon's cron time out limit
2. use az_person (a content type) instead of coh_person (a customized version of Drupal's user entity)

I personally like Approach 3, but am open.